Damn it my two year subscription just got refreshed...

Thank fuck I didn't get that subscription, I was looking into getting a secure mail service. I engaged with people calling proton a CIA honeypot, investigating what was up with the rumors and I was about to jump into bed with proton.

Server locations: Riseup is in the US (Washington state), so keep that in mind. Disroot is in the Netherlands (part of the EU).

Governance: Riseup: Look at their “about us” page. Disroot: Look at their “about” page. The terms of service are more detailed. tl;dr: As far as I can tell, these are run by leftists.

Integrity/Transparency: I have no idea how to grade this.

Ease of Use: Subjective. Riseup VPN is just: install the client, turn it on or off. Disroot is much better with a mail client of some kind, so if you already use one, it’s probably a 10, otherwise, the webmail server isn’t that great. Disroot also requries manual encryption (I’m biased here because I use Kmail which makes PGP really easy to use).

Pricing and Links: Free https://riseup.net/en/vpn https://disroot.org/en/services/email

tl;dr: Use collective-run services, not corporate-run services

I've been doing research into this because I want to degoogle. Looking for hosted and secure Mail, Calendar, Drive... maybe docs if possible. I don't mind paying as long as I'm a customer and not a product to be sold.

My short list was: Mailbox.org, Zoho, and Notion.

Then there are the services I don't understand as much because I don't really want to self host or step into server maintenance... NextCloud, OwnCloud, LibreCloud, OnlyOffice. Maybe someone could straighten me out with those if I'm off base.

I've been very happy with disroot.org, but you have to do your own encryption (I use Thunderbird).

I think I pay $10 per year for 5 GB, but they have a free plan.

Yo so question for y'alls: what's your opinion on using custom domain (for portability) vs masked emails?

Rn I have my main emails on my personal domain, and then I have masked emails going through xxx@fastmail.com for more anonymity + segmenting (err i mean just being able to disable a certain address individually) . But watching all this reminded me that if I decided to move away from fastmail, i'm much more locked-in this way. Do y'alls use a custom domain for masked email as well? The one thing I don't like about that is that it'd be so easy to connect multiple accounts based on domain, so anonymity is probably kinda broken.

I was mulling moving everything from Google to Proton. Guess I'll keep my money for now.

Thanks for this post. Any alternatives for Drive specifically?? Including self-hosted options

I swear by Njalla, which is run by Peter Sunde

In all seriousness, I genuinely feel like the demographics of those making over 250K/year outside of Silicon Valley (proton is from Switzerland which is a center-right country), and outside of the arts industries, is probably bare minimum of lib-center, and probably most likely to be at least fiscally conservative, if not socially as well. Those kind of people are more concerned with maintaining their financial position than the issues plaguing the income classes that the individual has graduated out of.

I don’t think you’re going to find many CEOs that aren’t at least a little right of center or self serving in their business interests.

Getting to the top 1% income bracket is a lot easier than maintaining that financial position.

Whatever you choose, remember that ease of migration is important. So for email buy your own domain name and use a service like mailbox.org that allows custom domains and full IMAP access.

I've been using Runbox for many years and it's weird i don't see recommendations.